Death row: the last hope

Linda Carty, a British citizen, has spent eight years on death row in Texas. Her supporters claim that she is innocent – and that one final appeal is all that can save her from lethal injection in the county with the highest execution rate in the US

It was an unseasonably cold day in May 2002 when Charlie Mathis walked into the Houston courtroom. He had been called as a ­witness for the prosecution, which he found puzzling: he had, after all, spent the last few years working with the woman now sitting in the dock, and felt sure she wasn't ­physically capable of committing murder – the crime ­before the court. In fact, if anything, he had expected to appear for the defence, but Mathis says that as he walked past the woman's ­lawyers, one of them turned to him and commented glibly: "Oh, I guess I should have talked to you some time, shouldn't I?"

It was an early sign that Linda Carty, the woman in the dock, had a difficult road ahead. A British passport holder from the Caribbean island of St Kitts, Carty is now 51 and has spent almost eight years on death row in Texas, accused of abducting and killing a woman in order to steal her baby and pass it off as her own.

In the early morning of 16 May 2001, four men broke into a flat in the apartment complex where Carty lived, demanding drugs and money from the people inside. Joana Rodriguez, who lived there with her husband and ­infant son, was later found suffocated in the boot of a car that belonged to Carty's daughter, her arms and legs bound with duct tape, and a plastic bag placed over her head. Her baby was found alive in another car later the same day. Three of the men – Chris ­Robinson, Gerald Anderson, Carliss Williams (the fourth has never been identified) – told police that Carty had planned the entire thing and that she told them if they broke into the ­apartment and kidnapped Rodriguez and her son, they would find 200lb of marijuana and cash inside.

In return for testifying against Carty, the three men were each ­promised lesser sentences. During the police ­investigation, a tenant in the same complex told detectives she had seen Carty the previous evening ­sitting in a car in the parking lot and that she had told her she was pregnant and that the baby was going to be born the next day.

Carty blames her conviction on her trial lawyer, whom she says was ­woefully inept. She also believes that she was framed by people she met in her work as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement ­Administration, a job that involved befriending ­criminals and passing on information to handlers such as ­Mathis. She says Robinson, Anderson and Williams must have been hired to carry out the task.

Last autumn, an appeal court ­rejected Carty's claim that her trial in 2002 was unfair. This means that the supreme court, and a rare last-minute reprieve from the board of paroles and pardons, is all that stands between her and the ultimate punishment: execution by lethal injection. This could come as early as this summer.

The British government seems to be rallying behind Carty: last year it filed an amicus brief (a legal document registering the concerns of a third party over the court's ­decision) at the 5th circuit court of appeals. On ­Friday, the human rights group ­Reprieve announced at a press ­conference that the government is filing another brief – this time to the US supreme court. In addition, the UK solicitor general, Vera Baird, plans to fly to Texas to increase British ­involvement in the case. But time is fast ­running out.

Although the number of executions in the US has declined over the last five years, the percentage carried out by Texas has increased. Since the mid-70s, Texas has been responsible for more than a third of all US ­executions; ­between 2002 and 2006 it was ­responsible for 40%, and last year it ­accounted for 50%, including two ­foreign nationals.

Kristin Houle, head of the Texas ­Coalition Against the Death Penalty, told me Harris County (where Carty had her trial) has sent 104 people to their death – more than any other state in the US, let alone county. "Death ­penalties peaked around the time Linda was convicted and sentenced – there were 40 new death sentences in Texas that year, 11 of them in Harris County. But in 2008 and 2009 there were no new death sentences in Harris County at all. The big question is, would Linda have been sentenced to death if her trial was today? It's doubtful."

At the Mountain View Unit, a ­maximum-security state prison in Gatesville, Texas, Carty remains ­upbeat and still hopes that she will be exonerated. She is investing all her emotional energy in an appeal her lawyers are making, and she wants the state of Texas to release fingerprint and DNA evidence that she says might prove she wasn't responsible.

"I'm not going to let anyone kill me knowing that we should have done x, y, z and it wasn't done," Carty says from behind bullet-proof perspex.

Carty's fingerprints were found in both her daughter's Chevrolet Cavalier, in which Rodriguez's body was found, and a Pontiac Sunfire, rented in her daughter's name and in which police found the kidnapped boy. But Carty says no fingerprints or DNA evidence were ever taken from the duct tape or plastic bag wrapped around the victim – or at least that if it was, it has never been released.

"There was nothing that linked me to the case except hearsay. I wouldn't put anything past these people [Robinson, Anderson and Williams] and they know I didn't know anything about it. Our paths had never crossed until that day. If the DNA on the body itself isn't mine, then whose is it? It was never tested. Houston's crime lab has done such shoddy work – they've got such incompetent people in there." (She has a point. An audit of Houston's crime lab in 2002 found that DNA ­technicians misinterpreted data, were poorly trained, and kept slipshod records.)

Carty's current appeal hinges on something known as the Strickland Standard. This essentially rules that a defence counsel must be an ­"effective advocate of their client's position", and Carty's current lawyers say that her original trial attorney, Jerry Guerinot, was far from effective. In fact, out of around 40 of Guerinot's clients charged with capital murder, 20 were ­sentenced to death. Clive Stafford-Smith, founder and ­director of ­Reprieve, says: "Jerry Guerinot has, in my ­opinion, the worst record of any capital defence lawyer in America. He has had more clients sentenced to death than most states have prisoners on death row . . . He's shockingly bad." Guerinot didn't return a call asking for comment.

Back in her native St Kitts, Carty taught children from low-income families in the hope they could have a better lot in life. She was active in her local church and had political aspirations too – she was heavily involved with the People's Action Movement, a party founded on a platform of anti-corruption and opposition to unfair taxes.

Carty and her family emigrated to the US in 1982 and she went on to study pharmacology at the University of Houston. It was while she was a student there that she was recruited as an undercover informant by the DEA and asked to befriend suspected drug traffickers, usually of Caribbean origin, and pass information to Mathis, who says that Carty risked her life for him on several occasions. This background would, her current lawyers insist, have been crucial in helping convince the jury of her good character at her ­original trial.

According to the prosecution, Carty started living with her boyfriend, Jose Corona, three years before the murder, and although she had a grown-up daughter, Jovelle Joubert, she told ­Corona three times that she was expecting another child, and then later that she had miscarried on each occasion. Two weeks before the murder, according to the prosecution, Corona threatened to leave Carty because she kept lying about being pregnant but she pleaded with him to stay, insisting she was going to have a baby boy on 16 May – the day Rodriguez was murdered.

The prosecution claimed that Carty could no longer conceive and planned to cut the baby out of Rodriguez's womb with a pair of scissors and pass it off as her own. The State's lawyers dramatically produced a pair of Carty's scissors in court, which ­succeeded in eliciting a strong ­response from the jury; they were, in fact, bandage ­scissors with rounded ends – ­incapable of cutting through skin and muscle ­tissue. In any case, Rodriguez had given birth three days before the murder.

Stafford-Smith says Carty has been in abusive relationships. "She is a battered woman and she was raped when she was younger," he says. "The ­prosecution argued that she ­desperately wanted a child to maintain the relationship she was in. But that's a small fact that you invariably build a bigger story on.

"The prosecution came up with a ­motive that she wanted to steal this woman's child because she wasn't ­having her own child. But she had bought those rounded-end bandage scissors for her daughter who was ­going to pharmacy school. Guerinot could have pointed this out just by picking up the scissors."

Carty says that aside from Robinson, Anderson and Williams, there was one other person who knew the truth about what happened to Rodriguez – a man called William Arvizu, with whom she was associated through her work for Mathis and the DEA. She says Arvizu had borrowed the car in which ­Rodriguez's body was found, and was therefore clearly connected with the crime. But seven months before Carty's case even came to trial, Arvizu was shot dead, along with his pregnant wife and their five-year-old daughter.

"I was on recreation and looking at the TV at the time," Carty says. "I saw William Arvizu had been shot, execution-style, in his home and I just started screaming and crying. The only person who knew the truth – other than my co-accused – was dead."

The prosecution claimed Carty was seen in one of the cars the night before the murder. They also said that baby clothes were found in a bag in the back seat. Carty says she wasn't in the car and that the Houston Police ­Department must have planted the clothes. "My storage unit was broken into," she says. "All those clothes had been labelled and packed away in there." I called the Houston Police Department to speak to the original investigating ­officers in the case, but their public ­affairs spokesman told me: "They're just not available to talk on the matter.")

I also wrote to Robinson, Anderson and Williams – each currently serving a lengthy sentence in various Texas prisons – requesting interviews. Only Anderson replied, saying he was "not acquainted with Ms Carty", but that if I helped him with his appeal, he would do all he could to help me ­"resolve [my] questions surrounding the Carty case". In the trial, however, it was precisely his "acquaintance" with Carty that led to her conviction and sentence.

Today, Mathis is clearly fighting ­demons. Now a private investigator, he is upset that he took the stand for the prosecution and not on Carty's behalf. "I never wanted to help put anybody on death row," he tells me. He says that if Carty did organise the kidnapping then she was mentally ill, but that he is sure she was incapable of murder. "If nothing else, she needed a better legal team on her side. I think everybody ­deserves a proper trial," he says. "I think the guys hog-tied that woman, they stuffed her into that hatchback, and her lungs couldn't fill with air . . . All we know is what the men said and they were trying to avoid the death penalty too. Is that fair?"

Carty's lawyers are waiting to see whether the supreme court will take the case. But according to David Dow, litigation director of the Texas ­Defender Service and a professor of law at the University of Houston, such intervention is rare.

Still, Carty's daughter lives in hope her mother will be exonerated. "To be honest we prayed [the appeal court] would find in her favour last year, but we knew in Texas they weren't ­going to overturn anything. With mum, one, not being a citizen, two, being a woman, and three, being black, it's ­going to be an upward battle. My hope is that the supreme court will hear her case."

Stafford-Smith says that if this fails, then hope will rest solely on a petition for clemency. The worst-case scenario? The court rejects the appeal or refuses even to grant Carty a hearing. If this happens, the ruling will come before the court goes into summer recess and Carty could be executed as early as June or July.

For now, Carty spends 20 hours a day in her cell, praying that her appeal will be heard. I ask if she finds solace in the company of her fellow inmates. "I don't talk to them," she says. "I don't want to be around negativity. My life is more important than that. You would think it would break me, but it hasn't."